


Feral

by Copper_Nails (Her_Madjesty)



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Body Dysphoria, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, Suffering, Survival Horror, Wilderness Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-08
Updated: 2018-01-08
Packaged: 2019-03-01 23:35:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13305711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Her_Madjesty/pseuds/Copper_Nails
Summary: Rey’s first lesson, though it takes her years to realize, is this: water is never to be wasted on Jakku.





	Feral

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: this is not a pretty fanfiction. This is not rated "M" for my usual, fun reasons; this is rated "M" because Rey survived on a hell world for ten or more years and, in that time, definitely a) killed people, b) ate and drank questionable, taboo things, and c) probably would not have adjusted to being around other people on a consistent basis as easily as she did in the movie!verse.
> 
> For more on the things Rey did or did not eat while living on Jakku, check out peradii's really nifty meta [here](http://peradii.tumblr.com/tagged/loudly-implied-cannibalism). This fic is written in the style of a Chaucerian format as proposed by anghraine on Tumblr; each of the seven sections is composed of seven sentences, as proposed in the original challenge, issued [here](http://anghraine.tumblr.com/post/145320294168/chaucer-meme).
> 
> One last warning, again: though this is a short one-shot, this fic invokes some weird, gross, and violent stuff. Don't like, don't read.

I.

After he presses cool credits into her parents’ hands, Plutt leads Rey to a shanty made of metal and willowy wood, home to a mute with crow’s feet and frown lines etched deep into her leathery skin. Rey sniffles under her dark gaze until snot and wetness coat her face and hands. Instead of wiping her tears away, the mute slinks forward and collects Rey’s tears with her thumb, licking them off as she stares at a spot of shelter just beyond Rey’s head.

It is Rey’s first lesson, though it takes her years to realize it: water is never to be wasted on Jakku.

The mute – who Rey learns to call Asha – guides her through the first acts of scavenging, walks beside her on the planet’s shifting dunes until Rey manages to find her feet. When Plutt starts to whittle down their portions, Rey learns to find food in the sand itself, then in the tangles of Asha’s hair.

She eats mites for the first time in the tongue-shriveling heat of a Jakku night; they crunch between her molars and do as much as portions to quell the eternal growling in her stomach.

II.

Asha leaves her, hundreds of tally marks after Rey is pressed into her care. Fourteen tallies later, a drunk stumbles too close to the skeleton of the AT-AT Rey has taught herself to call home.

She hides in the machinery’s shadows, watching him waste himself on mutterings and a bottle that has already been emptied. When he spots her, she tries to make herself small, but she is not one of the creatures the planet is willing to house; she lacks a prey animal’s natural camouflage, and he is an unnatural kind of predator.

When he corners her, she reaches out, desperate, and finds a broken sliver of metal to press against his throat.

(“I didn’t mean to kill him,” she whispers to the desert, later, with her hands buried deep in the sand as she tries to cleanse herself of blood. “I didn’t _mean_ to.”)

III.

She does not remember how she learns the story of the ouroboros – in an exchange with another scavenger, perhaps, or during one of the rare visits the Niima Outpost received from off-planet traders. What Rey does remember is appreciating the creatures’ resourcefulness. She thinks on them as she fashions a filtration system out of the parts of old star destroyers, better for her to bring water into her body, out of it, and then back into it again. She imagines the ripple of their scales on the days her blood pools close to the surface of her skin, when stress or injury drive her to dig her fingernails into her nail beds and to clean herself of mites, ticks, and loose threads of skin in order to eat (there are other scavengers whose bodies go missing after their deaths, but none of the locals living in the outpost like to talk about that – they see Rey with her bleeding hands and offer her a wide berth, all while Plutt laughs).

Jakku’s second most important lesson, Rey comes to know, is an early and absolute rejection of personal pride. She leans back against the too-hot metal of her AT-AT and gathers the fruits of her filtration system close, sipping slowly in order to keep from swelling her stomach in her desperate drive for water.

Plutt, when she works up the nerve to ask him, blames the shortage of portions on the mercurial nature of the Republic, and for the first several weeks of her life as a scavenger, Rey believes him.

IV.

It never feels as though she actually leaves Jakku – Rey keeps the planet’s dirt beneath her fingernails, in every fold of her clothing, in the indelicate injuries, bruises, and scars puckering her skin. She wanders the _Millennium Falcon_ as it cruises at BB-8’s command, dragging her fingertips over the cool metal. Finn follows just behind, but he thinks her in the midst of cataloging a joyful, final freedom.

He looks surprised when she turns to him and says, “You see those gas feeds? I could trade those in for two and a half portions each. The laser actuators, those are a week’s worth, if Plutt is feeling generous; an empty missile magazine would only get me through a day.”

Her voice cracks, weary from lack of use, but she marches forward with glazed eyes and a growling stomach until Finn’s hands come down on her shoulders, and he asks her, shaking, to stop, please, stop.

V.

Han catches her licking the remnants of one of the rathtars off of her hands. Rey blinks back at him, fingers still in her mouth, and informs him that whatever ooze the creatures happen to excrete tastes about the same as well-squashed lizard, if gamier and smoother against the throat.

“Do they have bones?” she asks, chasing the taste of them beneath her fingernails.

“I don’t know, kid,” Han rasps. He stares for longer than he should, but Rey doesn’t recognize the gesture; she licks until her hands are clean, then moves on to her hair, undoing her ragged buns and picking excess from each strand.

Han does not stop her, but when Rey looks into his face, he refuses to meet her gaze. Once she has finished, he toes her ankle with his boot and herds her towards the _Millennium Falcon_ ’s galley before shoving a protein bar into her scarred (but clean) hands.

VI.

Her first taste of the Force presses Rey out of her skin. She loses sense of her tongue as she bites back a scream, Kylo Ren pressing against the folds of her brain, and she looks down on her own body, shivering with confusion and waves of self-revulsion that either radiate from him or from her or from the thing waking up inside her body. Whatever it is, it winds around her, pulsing like a wound; it is in and out and around; a mess of self-inversion.

Rey reaches out, past the boy, past herself, and forces herself back into her own body.

She passes out.

Moments later, she opens her eyes in time to see Kylo Ren stumbling away from her, his eyes wide and his hands clutching at each opposite wrist.

Her body does not feel like her own with the Force settling into it, but Rey fights back her tears and acquaints herself with the wriggling of it, like mites trapped in the clasp of her teeth.

VII.

Starkiller explodes, and Rey has bodies on every side of her, pressing close as she is escorted into the bunks on D’Qar. She feels General Leia Organa watching her, but there is little time for the two of them to talk; pilot Jessika Pava presses Rey into her bunk, instead, and shows her the smallest sonic shower this side of Tatooine before instructing Rey to “wipe the Dark Side smell off of you, kriff.”

Rey steps, fully clothed, into the ‘fresher. She makes quick sense of the array of dials, but the rush of air – the burst of soap and mist and pain on her tongue, in her eyes, across her skin -

Rey screams.

When she opens her eyes again, she is gasping, and Jessika’s hands are clutching her arms, but there is another presence playing in the stratosphere – dancing alongside the bodily invader that is the Force.

Rough hands wipe the soap from her face and pull back from Rey’s tearless eyes. When she sees Leia Organa hovering over her, concern written in her every angle, Rey babbles, “Sorry, I’m sorry – I just – on Jakku, we weren’t meant to waste our water.”

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't seen too much work invoking the Force as something invasive; it's been played with as corrupting or inhuman (see the Dark Side's more saturated devotees and/or the various, beautiful interpretations of the Skywalker clan as eldritch horrors), but most of its users seem pretty okay with their expanded awareness of the galaxy. If you know of any users who rejected their connection with the Force or found it repulsive, let me know; I'd like to read those stories.
> 
> Thanks for reading through the work.


End file.
